NEWS The Michigan Daily - Monday, January 9, 2006 - 3A ON CAMPUS * Free HIV testing at Office of LGBT affairs A counselor from the HIV/Aids Resource Center will be at the Office of LGBT Affairs from 6 to 7 p.m. today offering free and anonymous HIV test- ing. This service will be offered every Monday for the rest of the semester. Seattle artist to share scientific painting Jaq Chartier, an artist who explores scientific methods through experimen- tation with paint, will give a lecture today at the Institute for the Humanities from noon to 1 p.m. The lecture will be held at 520 of the Rackham Building.. Admission is free. CRIME NOTES Suspect urinates on Church Street A Department of Public Safety officer caught a subject urinating at 525 Church Street at about 1:43 a.m on Saturday, DPS reported. The subject received a citation. Drunk passes out in East Quad A caller reported at about 1:45 a.m. on Saturday that an intoxicated person was locked in a second-floor bathroom in East Quadrangle and had passed out. The per- son was cited for an MIP and transported to the emergency room. Suspect caught smoking pot in hospital Police caught a person smoking mari- juana in the University Hospital on Satur- day at about 7:31 am., DPS reported. THIS DAY T __ T'1 - .1 -- I !T _. -_ Bill would help with heating costs Legislation would prevent utility shutoffs and offer energy tax credits LANSING (AP) - Jean Casler used the cash she received for Christmas to help cover her heat- ing bill last month, but she doesn't know how she's going to make her January payment. "I don't see any way that I am going to get that money," said Casler, a 70-year-old Lansing-area resident who has multiple sclerosis and only a $620 monthly disability check to pay her bills. Casler is among many low-income people in Michigan who already are tapping into programs that help pay for heat, but need more this winter because of significantly higher fuel rates. Their plight has prompted a num- ber of state lawmakers to draw up legislation that would cover more low-income residents and give them more aid, prevent utility shutoffs dur- ing the winter months and offer tax credits to people who buy energy efficient appliances. House Republicans want to lift the income requirement to receive the Home Heating Credit from 110 percent of poverty - $17,699 for a family of three - to 130 percent, or $20,917. Democrats, meanwhile, wantto ban utilities from shutting off heat service in the winter because of over- due bills, give the Michigan Public Service Commission the ability to use $5 million of research money to help people pay heating bills and set up a database to coordinate volun- teers available to make homes more energy efficient. Protections already are in place to prevent shutoffs for some utility customers. Casler, for example, is enrolled in the Winter Protection Pro- gram, which allows her to pay a small portion of her heating bill and avoid shutoffs from November to March. She said her monthly bill from Jack- son-based Consumers Energy is $86, which she said it still too much. Although lawmakers are looking at more measures to make heating bills affordable, they may not be able to pass them in time to help people such as Casler this heating season. Yet many groups that help people pay their energy bills said improvements are needed now. Kathleen Walgren, executive direc- tor of The Heat and Warmth Fund, a nonprofit group that provides emergen- cy assistance to people facing shutoffs, said she doesn't think the organization will have enough money this winter to get help to everyone who needs it. The nonprofit organization has received about $4.5 million from the Michigan Public Service Commission to help low-income people cover their high energy bills and is raising extra money, Walgren said. Last year, it had $6.5 million altogether, she said. While the group's funding is likely to be close to last year's levels, heating bills are up by nearly 50 percent, Walgren said. Its resources also may be drained faster than previous years because more people need help covering bigger bills, she said. "We're going to get a lot of angry customers, people who don'tlike to be in the situation of having to ask for help," she said. "People are confused. They don't know how to apply and they've never had to do this before. They're sort of insulted they have to look for help." Low-income individuals and families are not the only ones try- ing to deal with high energy rates this winter. Many middle-income families are making more room in their budgets for the higher costs while trying to find ways to use less energy. Widows sue over 2003 Afghan helicopter crash One Michigan man killed in Nov. 2003 disaster that killed eight soldiers MIAMI (AP) - On a cold Janu- ary day almost two years ago, family members and friends of five Special Forces servicemen killed in an Air Force helicopter crash in Afghanistan gathered at Arlington National Cem- etery for their burial, receiving folded American flags and honored by "These are a military flyover State DNR pushes Detroit deer hunting and a seven-gun cases to wi In Daily History Assembly caves to regental pressure Jan. 9, 1979 - Members of the Michigan Student Assembly may have voted in December against boycotting the University's presidential selection process in hopes of securing the sup- port of the Board of Regents on other issues, according to some representa- tives in the assembly. Several members, including Vice President Kate Rubin, said they hoped the Regents would accept proposals in December calling for modifications in the Michigan Union's operation. Last month the assembly voted 12-10 in favor of naming a student committee to advise the regents on presidential candidates. Members were prepared to boycott the selec- tion process entirely, arguing that the regents were excluding them too much from the decision. Following the controversial vote, the Regents tabled their decision in order to request more information on the assembly-proposed modifications to the Union, which called for trans- ferring supervision of the Union proj- ect to the Office of Student Services, under vice president Henry Johnson, who is in charge of the office. The proposal also requested chang- ing the hotel rooms in the Union to dormitory rooms. Rubin said the Union issue came up frequently in the Assembly dur- ing discussions about the presidential selection process. "The issue of the Union was used as a threat by some assembly mem- bers," Rubin said, adding that MSA President Eric Arnson encouraged the assembly to "act on the presidential selection process or lose the Union." Arnson said he could not recall the exact discussion on the day of the stu- dent committee vote, but he said he remembered "there was some concern about relations with the Regents as a whole. (The Union resolution) might have been on people's minds." Memhrs of the asemblv were torn i State officials worried that deer will spread bovine tuberculosis DETROIT (AP) - Michigan officials want to encourage hunt- ing in the Detroit area in an effort to cut by 54,000 the estimated 116,000 deer in communities around the city. Officials also hope to cut by nearly a third the 868,000 deer in the southern part of the Lower Peninsula. New measures to reduce deer could include more hunting sea- sons, longer seasons or split sea- sons with more opening days, said wildlife habitat biologist Earl Flegler of the state Department of Natural Resources. Other possibilities are increas- ing the incentives to hunt deer without antlers - which tend to be female - and increasing mar- keting to encourage hunting, The Detroit News reported yesterday. State officials are concerned that deer could spread bovine tubercu- losis or chronic wasting disease, ailments that are now limited to northern Michigan. Other concerns are that deer feeding could threat- en the regeneration of foliage New subdivisions have turned once-hunted wooded areas into landscapes that attract deer with young trees, shrubs and grass. Once there, the deer invade gar- dens, eat plants, rummage through trash, cause car crashes and leave behind droppings. Adding to the population is that the animals' fertility allows them to grow herds by 50 percent each year, said Rod Clute, a big game specialist with the DNR. "If we harvest a third of the pop- ulation, they can match that the fol- lowing year," he said. "Then we're right back where we started." Rare 35 years ago, the deer are now more plentiful in south- ern Michigan than in the rest of the state combined, state figures show. They live in mostly northern Detroit suburbs but also have been seen in developed areas in Dear- born, Auburn Hills and Romulus. Michigan officials reassess the deer population every five years. salute. The service- is not imp men were memo- rialized- at the ceremony by a chaplain, Col. David Boyles, as "five brave young men who gave their lives not only for their country, but for friends and family, to keep them free." Now, the widows of three of the men are suing defense contractors for the wrongful deaths of their husbands in the 2003 crash, which the Air Force blamed on engine failure of the MH- 53M Pave Low helicopter caused in part by failure of auxiliary fuel tanks to jettison. While not unheard of, such lawsuits in wartime are uncommon, and fre- quently involve sensitive information about military hardware that the gov- ernment doesn't want in open court. "These are difficult cases to win, but it is not impossible," said Randall Craft, an attorney with the Holland & Knight law firm who specializes in aviation liability issues. According to an Air Force accident report, the Pave Low flight dubbed "Beatle 12" carrying 13 passengers and crew crashed Nov. 23, 2003, about five minutes after it lifted off from C Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. The helicopter, which can carry up to 55 people, was part of a Special Opera- tions "infiltration" mission in the war against Taliban and al-Qaida fighters during Operation Mountain Resolve. The aircraft was on its third sortie of the day. A compressor problem caused one of the two engines on the Pave Low to stall, leaving it with one engine oper- ating and far too much weight to carry in the thin mountain air. The pilots "attempted difficult to jettison the auxiliary n, but it tanks with- out success" )ssible." and then the other engine - Randall Craft, stalled while ' an emergen- attorney cy landing was being attempted, the Air Force concluded. With all power lost, the helicopter fell from an altitude of about 200 feet onto an uneven river bank, rolled over and burst into flames. Eight people somehow managed to survive - but four Air Force personnel and one Army officer were killed. Their remains were difficult to identify and were buried together at Arlington under a single tombstone bearing all five names. Those killed were: Air Force Staff Sgt. Thomas A Walkup Jr. of Mill- ville, N.J.; Air Force Maj. Steven Plumhoff of Neshanic Station, N.J.; Air Force Tech Sgts. Howard A Wal- ters of Port Huron, Mich., and Wil- liam J Kerwood of Houston, Mo.; and Army Sgt. Maj. Phillip R Albert of Terryville, Conn. Walters, Kerwood and Walkup were all assigned to Hurlburt Field, Fla. Plumhoff's home base was Kirt- land Air Force Base, N.M.; Albert was assigned to Fort Drum, N.Y. Widows Melissa Walters, Kara Kerwood and Yvette LaPointe- Plumhoff have filed lawsuits in fed- eral court in Miami accusing the Pave Low's maker, Sikorsky Aircraft Corp., and two fuel tank installation and maintenance companies of negli- gence that led to the crash. The lawsuits seek an unspecified amount of damages. None of the women responded to requests for comment for this article. The Air Force accident report, which by law cannot be used as evidence in civil lawsuits, concluded that there was "insufficient written guidance" available to check on the status of the fuel tank jet- tison system. The lawsuits contend that Sikorsky, Lear Siegler Services Inc. and Smiths Aerospace LLC never instructed maintenance personnel to perform nec- essary electrical tests to assure the tanks would drop in an emergency. "The jettison system was indispens- able to the ability of the MH-53M crew to avoid a crash by rapidly reducing the helicopter's weight in the event one of the two engines failed during flight," says one of the lawsuits. The widows also claim in their lawsuits that the tank design was faulty because it had no backup jettison system. Sikorsky, a unit of defense con- tractor United Technologies Corp., denies that its aircraft or maintenance schedules were to blame, saying that the Pave Low and its operation "met the standards of the state-of-the-art, scientific knowledge" and that no red flags had been raised about any defects in the fuel tanks. Sikorsky also contends that it had no control over possible "misuse" of the helicopter by the Air Force. Lear Siegler also denied any liabil- ity. Smiths Aerospace said it has not yet confirmed whether it actually sup- plied the tanks on the Pave Low, but spokeswoman Jennifer Villarreal said in an e-mail that the company has begun a review of the tanks and relat- ed equipment as a result of the crash. THE BIGGEST BACK TO SCHOOL POSTER SLE 000 foi'S . 0-.C 5 V111VAiSVit VEIIVEiV -. ..